Forcing an IP Address

In the “real” world you simply add an entry to /etc/hosts like
1.2.3.4 myhost

The Mac OS X world is different. For version 10.5 and later you do the following
# Create the mapping
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Hosts/x.y.z IPAddress 127.0.0.1
# flush the cache
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

It did change somewhere – I have some irritating sites mapped to 0.0.0.0 in my /etc/hosts. That used to send them nowhere, but now it’s sending them to localhost. But the local /etc/hosts file is still consulting. If I ping anything that’s in my hosts file, the ping goes to the IP from the hosts file, not the true IP.